Ten new scatter brushes bring musical texture to Figma Draw
Figma has expanded Figma Draw with 10 new scatter brushes designed for stippling and shading. Where the existing stretch brushes handle calligraphy and charcoal-inspired lines, the scatter brush set is meant to add depth and texture. Product Designer Rogie King, who designed the brushes, describes the relationship between the two tool types simply: “If the stretch brushes are the star of the show, scatter brushes are like the soundtrack, giving texture to the work.”
Any vector-based element can become a brush in Figma Draw, but the goal was to ship a useful range of styles out of the gate. To decide which directions to explore, King collaborated with UX Writer Molly Rosen Marriner. After Marriner had named the original stretch brushes after movie genres, she offered King a list of music genres to work from this time.
“Music was a great choice for scatter brushes because the patterns in a stroke are repetitive. They feel like beats.”
From genre names to brush strokes
The musical framing fit the mechanics of the feature: stroke settings let you adjust gap, wiggle, and jitter, just as a musician would tweak tempo or texture. To gather a broad list of candidate genres, Marriner consulted the genre map Every Noise At Once and polled Figma employees on Slack. She kept only the names that felt visually evocative or suggested specific imagery.
“Some were hard to distinguish between, and some, like Spoken word, were certainly intimidating,” King recalls. Certain genres such as Rockabilly carried strong visual culture, while others were open to interpretation. King started with the strokes users would expect first, such as one for stippling, and then worked outward.
Research through listening and looking
For each genre, King listened to its top tracks and dug into its associated culture. During the work on the Screamo brush, he listened to “The Leaving Song Pt. II” by AFI and researched the early 2000s aesthetic of mosh pits, black hoodies, and heavy eyeliner to produce what he calls an “angsty, chaotic” result. He also pulled in outside experts, including his own son, who is "very into Shoegaze" and pointed King toward relevant artists.
The process produced 99 scatter brush designs. Afterward, the team voted on the designs that offered the greatest flexibility and expressiveness. Marriner then matched those final designs to genres from her original list or introduced new ones for pairings that did not fit. The final ten names are:
- Bubblegum
- Witch house
- Shoegaze
- Honky-tonk
- Screamo
- Drone
- Doo-wop
- Spoken word
- Vaporwave
- Oi!
Accessibility over art-school terminology
Beyond a fun naming exercise, the choice of genre-based labels was deliberate. King, who describes himself as a self-taught artist who "never went to art school, never picked up a physical brush," didn’t want to lean on traditional terms like “flat brush” or “gouache brush.”
“I wanted our community to embrace the joy of making art without worrying about having a formal education,” he says. “These names are fun, but they also let people know, ‘Hey, you can be an artist, too.’”
The new brushes are available now. An interactive playground file is posted on the Figma Community for trying them out in Figma Draw.
